Sugar and athletes: not so sweet truths about inflammation

As anyone who takes a keen interest in nutrition for performance and health will know, the topic of sugar consumption has come very much to the fore over the past decade or so. In a nutshell, there’s now good evidence to suggest that the nutritional advice given by ‘health experts’ over several decades focussing on cutting fat intake and switching to low-fat foods was fundamentally flawed because it ignored the role of sugar. While there’s no doubting that processed fats such as trans-fats and the excessive consumption of seed oils (eg sunflower, rape, corn etc) are undesirable from a health perspective⁽¹⁾, the low-fat message essentially put much of the blame for conditions such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes on saturated fat and cholesterol, while giving sugar and refined carbohydrate foods with added sugar a free pass.

Sugar and obesity

There’s much historical evidence to suggest that health professionals got it all wrong. If we look at the incidence of obesity (figures 1 and 2) we can see that it’s closely correlated with sugar consumption, and that the move to low-fat foods didn’t result in a decrease in obesity – rather it coincided with an increased incidence.

Figure 1: Sugar consumption (kg per year) in the UK and USA since 1700